“Where is she?” Phil said, looking at me calmly.
“Phil,” I said, “no wisecrack intended, but who are we talking about?”
“Jane Poslik,” he said, quite calmly, unclasping his hands.
“How should I know?” I said, with an innocent smile, looking over my shoulder to Seidman for sympathy, which Steve was not ready to deliver.
Phil found a pencil, considered breaking it in half, decided not to, put it down, and then stood up slowly. I wished he had broken the pencil.
“You were in the house when Olson was sponged,” he said. “And you say some woman who called herself Mrs. Olson was there with you. Now she’s missing. You wouldn’t know where she is, would you?”
“No, Phil,” I said. “I swear to you …”
“And then you go to see this Jane Poslik who used to work for Olson,” he went on. “A few hours later she disappears. Cawelti tells me you have her hidden some place.”
“And Cawelti is an honorable man,” I said.
“I want to know where people are and who killed the Olsons,” Phil said, coming around the desk. His tie was open and he gave it an extra tug to get it all the way off. “And who shot the head off a goddamn parrot and did a goddamn Van Gogh on a German shepherd.”
I looked up at him and shook my head.
“If I knew, I’d tell you. I would. But I’m pledged to secrecy. You’ll just have to go to Eleanor Roosevelt.”
“And you,” he said, reaching down to put a hand on my jacket, “will be on a tour of hell by the time I’m through with you.”
Something possessed me. It had been in me for a lifetime. Maybe a lot of things brought it out. Phil’s promotion, his fiftieth birthday, my realization that I had finally lost the real Anne, the one I’d been married to and always expected to get back, my chronically sore back that would some day give up, the memory of Lucy on Sunday crawling into my lap. I pushed Phil’s hand away and stood up fast, kicking the chair back.
“Enough,” I said. “I’ve had a lifetime of you mashing my face and using me for a whoopie cushion. You hit me and so help me the second you turn your back I’ll bring the closest chair down on your head so hard you’ll wind up downstairs picking splinters out of your desk sergeant.”
“You don’t talk to me like that, you, you wasted, useless-” he started.
Seidman finally came out of the corner and mumbled, “Okay, Phil. Enough.”
We both pushed Seidman out of the way and stood eye to eye.
“You know why you do that, huh? You know why you’ve been beating on me for forty years?” I said.
“Because you’re a wise-ass, worthless bum,” he shouted. “A bum who wasted his damned life, lost his wife, never had any kids, doesn’t have a dime, and acts like a dumb kid even though he’s pushing fifty. You know what it looks like, for-”
“Face it, Phil,” I shouted back. “I’m going to say the dirty word. You love me, but you dumb lard-fist, the only way you can show it is by trying to kill me because you don’t like what you feel for me. But I know it’s there because I feel the same thing. You use your fists and feet and I use words. Which hurts worse, brother? So for a change why don’t you just put your fists down and talk to me like people? When did you ever get anything out of me by kicking my ass? Don’t you know by now I come back like a well-watered victory garden when I get corked? It runs in the damn family.”
I’m a very persuasive person when I put my mind to it. Someone once told me that, but I don’t remember who. Unfortunately, Phil had never heard it.
My brother’s right hand grabbed my jacket and tugged me forward, tearing my zipper. His left hand shot forward, a short jab, his specialty, that caught me in the ribs. My lungs answered with a taco air. I slumped back trying to tighten up for the next shot, but it didn’t come. Seidman was between us, whispering, “Phil. Phil, come on.”
It was, apparently, a persuasive argument. Phil let go of my jacket and the metal end of the zipper tinkled across the floor. I sat back in the chair and Phil went back to his own chair. Seidman stood guarding the space between us.
We sat like that for about a minute or two with me panting softly and wondering if my rib was broken. Phil’s chest rose and fell more than usual. His brows were down and he found the pencil to play with again. He turned it over and over again.
“Feel better?” I finally said.
“Yeah,” said Phil.
“Good,” I said, touching the tender flesh over the raw rib. “Shall we go on?”
Phil smiled. It was a genuine smile. He tried to hide it behind an open palm over his mouth, but he couldn’t. His hand came down and he shook his head, smiling.
“I knew I could cheer you up,” I said seriously. “What’s a brother for?”
Seidman kicked the desk, which apparently sent a shiver of pain into his jaw. He let out a little grunt and walked back to the corner saying, “You’re both nuts, crazy nuts. I’m not getting between you again. You both remember that. I wash my hands of you.”
“Olson,” Phil said, small smile still on his lips.
“I’ve got a real lead,” I said. “Sure thing, tonight. You said I had till tomorrow night. Let’s stay with that. I’ll give you Olson’s killer, tell you where Jane Poslik is, and maybe where to find the fake Mrs. Olson.”
“Get out,” Phil said, waving his hand. “I’ve got shoe stores to protect. Are you hurt?”
“Hell yes,” I said.
“Good,” he answered, still smiling. “I wouldn’t want you to think I’m getting old and soft.”
Cawelti was in the hall, arms folded, leaning against the dirty wall. He shook his head and said quietly with false sympathy, “Can you use some help getting down the stairs?”
“Only if we can go piggy-back and I can put the spurs to you if you go too slow,” I said, walking away from him as normally as I could. It took me about a week to get out of the station, a week during which my entire life crawled before my eyes like a too-long French novel. The Mexican woman and her kid were gone and the old desk cop was on the phone, looking over his glasses at an advancing couple in their sixties. The man was cradling a big brown paper bag in his arms. I didn’t want to know what was in that bag so I hurried out into the late afternoon, but before the door closed I heard the old woman’s voice say, “I insist that we see Captain Pevsner immediately.”
Getting into my Ford was lots of fun. It kept me from thinking. Driving to Doc Hodgdon’s house was even more fun. Even Harriet Hilliard singing “This Love of Mine” on the radio didn’t diminish the joy I was feeling. By the time I pulled in front of the frame house where Hodgdon lived, I was so tickled that I could barely move, but I managed to get out, groan my way up the walk and stairs and into the house, the first floor of which had been converted by Doc Hodgdon to offices for his orthopedic practice back in 1919 before anyone used the word orthopedic.
Hodgdon’s secretary-receptionist Myra, who had miraculously escaped the tar pits in the Pleistocene Period, gave me a sour look. No one was in the waiting room and she looked like she was packing her broomstick to go home.
“Doctor’s office hours are over at four on Monday,” she said.
“I’m dying,” I said. “He took an oath.”
“Doctor will be available in the morning,” she said. “I can give you an emergency appointment at noon.”
I put my hand on a nearby chair to steady myself.
“By noon tomorrow, I will have died of wounds,” I continued, not wanting to end our pleasant repartee. “Maybe he has time to give me a Vitalis sixty-second workout.”
“Mocking the war is not in good taste,” she said. “You will just have to-”
“What is all the noise about?” said Hodgdon, sticking his head out of his office door. His sleeves were rolled up and he held something that looked like a roll of tape in his hand. He was gray, almost sixty-six, and hard as a tree stump. He was also the man I had never beaten at handball. He spotted me and shook his head. Everyone seemed to be shaking their heads at me this week, a pitiful specimen who should have been pickled and put on exhibition with a little sign underneath saying, “Here but for the grace of God, go you.”